OpenShift scored a Linux OS trifecta for PaaS last week with the announcement of CentOS 6.5 availability of OpenShift Origin

OpenShift Origin’s support for CentOS, Fedora and RHEL now makes OpenShift Origin, Red Hat’s Open Source Platform as a Service available on more Linux distributions than any other PaaS offering on the market today. CentOS has long been a favorite Linux distribution for cloud and web hosting providers like Hostgator and GoDaddy. Perhaps these announcements will encourage them to offer PaaS as a value-added service in the near future.

This past week, Red Hat entered a new era of collaboration between Red Hat and the CentOS communities. The OpenShift team has eagerly awaited the announcement, and today we are pleased to announce the release of OpenShift Origin VM for CentOS (based on Origin V3). OpenShift Origin’s support for CentOS opens new avenues for engagement with the users and projects that consume OpenShift Origin on CentOS.

Cross-Community Collaboration on PaaS

We’re thrilled to be working with the CentOS community to make deploying OpenShift Origin on CentOS as seamless as possible.

“We’re looking forward to working with the OpenShift community on making OpenShift Origin, their open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering available on CentOS Linux, and collaborating with the community around the platform. By incorporating OpenShift into a CentOS Special Interest Group (SIG), the community is helping broaden availability of the increasingly popular platform-as-a-service. We’re looking forward to offering OpenShift Origin on the coming Cloud variants of CentOS as well as supporting OpenShift Origin as a deployment option for CentOS 6.5.” – Johnny Hughes, CentOS Board Member

We’ll be working closely with the CentOS community and joining in on the CentOS Cloud SIG and attending upcoming CentOS Dojos & Office Hours, we look forward to meeting everyone in person or on irc soon.

As some of the world’s largest Internet operations run CentOS, we have been keen to provide a reliable, SELinux-secured and stable build of OpenShift Origin for CentOS. This new CentOS release enables OpenShift to extend our community reach even deeper into the OpenStack and web hosting communities.

Commitment to ongoing support for CentOS

CentOS has grown very popular among many users and projects operating across our community ecosystem. Over the past few years, we’ve had lots of requests for CentOS from both enterprise and web hosting providers, we’re pleased to also announce that we have added CentOS to our build and release process for each OpenShift Origin release going forward and that we will be working closely with the CentOS Cloud SIG to ensure compliance with the CentOS community’s distribution processes.

What’s different about OpenShift Origin on CentOS?

We’ve included some new package(s) for avahi-based MDNS Multicast support. All packages compiled against EL6 mock target to ensure that CentOS has all the required dependencies in it and it will work on both RHEL and CentOS. Other than that, it’s just been the regular build/test/debug “business-as-usual” for any Origin release cycle.

There are no changes to Puppet scripts for deploying OpenShift Origin, so to deploy just go to https://install.openshift.com/ and follow the instructions there.

Continuing to support Fedora & RHEL (of course)

Our support for CentOS is complementary to our continued Fedora support, as explemfied by our recent release of OpenShift Origin V3 for Fedora 19. Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise on RHEL will remain the best option for enterprises looking for fully-supported on-premise or private cloud deployments on top of and run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. OpenShift Enterprise includes built-in support for Java(TM), Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl and full suite of additional programming languages and developer tools for streamlining development processes.